March 2019 / The year was 1978 and I was a newly-minted bank lending officer at Irving Trust Company in Manhattan. Fresh out of high school and desperate for any type of recognition, I volunteered to join a small group of adventurers involved in introducing a futures contract on the New York Mercantile Exchange (the Exchange) to local heating oil dealers. For the uninitiated, the Exchange opened...
February 2019 / The center was not holding—it was a country of bankruptcy notices and public auction announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes as families routinely disappeared. — Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem Sounds all too familiar as we hurtle past a dysfunctional White House and confront the major new battleground between...
January 2019 / If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story. — Orson Welles In the world of New York City diesel-based heating oil, the story for No. 6 residual oil came to an end in 2015, while No. 4 oil will be eliminated by 2030. With that looming timetable it is surprising to learn that as many as one-third of all New York buildings are still using No. 4...
November-December 2018 / Hard as it may be for a state so framed to be shaken, yet, since all that comes into being must decay, even a fabric like this will not endure forever, but will suffer dissolution. — Plato, The Republic Ten years on from the financial crisis (a.k.a Great Recession)—whose beginnings are officially measured from the collapse of Lehman Brothers—we need to take stock of the...
October 2018 / Inequality has now reached levels not seen since 1929, the year the Great Depression began, and stands to get even worse. — Chris Hughes, Fair Shot I recently attended a Community Board meeting having to do with Waterside Plaza in the Kips Bay section of Manhattan. For the uninitiated, Waterside Plaza was built on a landfill brought to the U.S. as ships’ ballast from the...
Best-selling financial author, Wall Street investment banker, social commentator, award-winning poet, energy consultant, off-Broadway producer, and community organizer in Robert Kennedy’s presidential campaign, Ron Spurga is the ultimate Renaissance Man.